BOB LAW: IDEAS, ENERGIES, TRANSMUTATIONS AUDIO GUIDE TRANSCRIPT Introduction ‘Bob Law: Ideas, Energies, Transmutations’ is the artist’s first solo exhibition since 2012. Law was one of the key proponents of English Minimalism, which developed contemporaneously with American Minimalism in the early 1960s. His drawings, paintings and reliefs engage with questions of abstraction, seriality, pictoriality and the frame that were central to the art of the 1960s and 70s; and his work was shown alongside that of Jo Baer, Sol LeWitt, Robert Mangold and Robert Ryman. Yet Law’s artistic trajectory and his esoteric interests set him apart from these American artists, as this exhibition demonstrates. Almost entirely self-taught, he had embarked on a series of apprenticeships in carpentry and architecture before moving to St. Ives in the late 1950s where he met artists including Ben Nicholson and Peter Lanyon. In 1959 he saw the large abstract paintings of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko at the Tate Gallery, which had a lasting impact. Law moved to London in 1960 and was championed by the critic and curator Lawrence Alloway, whom he had met in Cornwall. That year, his work was exhibited in a two-person exhibition at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. During the 1960s and 70s Law’s work was shown across Europe at the Konrad Fischer Gallery in Dusseldorf, the Rolf Preisig Gallery in Basel and the Lisson Gallery in London, culminating in two major solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford and the Whitechapel Art Gallery in the 1970s. In the 1980s Law turned to sculpture, drawing on his background in carpentry to invest abstract forms with absurdist and anthropomorphic connotations. The current exhibition surveys Law’s work from the late 1950s to the mid 1990s, highlighting its affective, wry, and whimsical qualities. These aspects of Law’s practice resonate with a re-enchantment of abstract art that has continued since his death in 2004, in works by younger generations of artists that could be described in terms of romantic conceptualism or affective minimalism. Gallery 1 The exhibition opens with the series of “Field Drawings” Law began in the meadows surrounding his St. Ives home during the late 1950s. Influenced by the writings of nineteenth century “nature mystic” Richard Jeffries, Law lay on his back to observe the landscape, in pursuit of an ecstatic communion with the earth. He mapped the limits of his visual field in the skewed frames that bound these pictures, which became fundamental to his subsequent drawings and paintings. Some of the “Field Drawings,” such as Drawing 21.4.59, include schematic trees, grass and sun-shapes pushed to the margins; while others suggest an upward rush of energy, which assumes frankly erotic connotations in Untitled Field Drawing 22.1.63. Even when these details are emptied out, we have the sense that Law’s framed spaces are charged with numinous potential, setting them apart from the non- referential ethos of American Minimalism. In the niches between galleries 1 and 2, we see a pair of monochromes from 1979-1980 entitled Black Diamond 14 on the left, and Cast Black Diamond on the right. Black Diamond 14 is painted in acrylic, extending the series of black monochromes Law began in the mid-1960s. These paintings utilized multiple coats of paint in a variety of colors including black, blue, and violet, some of which can be discerned towards the edge of the painting which Law differentiated from the central field, as we can see in Black Diamond 14. Each coat of paint took two days to dry and Law would sit in a chair opposite the work, contemplating it in a meditative state. Cast Black Diamond is an iron cast of the same canvas, which plays with the relationship between painting, sculpture, and relief. Playing with Law’s interest in alchemy, these paired works present the transmutation of a monochromatic painting into the weighty metallic object hung on the opposite wall. Gallery 2 In Gallery 2, these transformational and trans-medial concerns are taken up by the monumental relief Hole Within a Whole of 1982. This vast tin-plate and copper relief is more than two meters wide, punctuated by the nails that hold the plates together and a small rectangular window that ruptures the picture plane and reveals the gallery wall behind. This imposing work relates to Law’s drawing for a hypothetical sculpture, Here Comes the Sun (The Devil’s View) (1980), which he envisaged to mark the dawn of the third millennium. The proposed sculpture was to consist of a twenty-by-thirty-foot steel wall intended to block out the sun, save for a small rectangular hole, through which light would shine onto an obelisk. Law proposed that the relative positions of the sun, the wall, and the obelisk would be determined by an astronomer. Two of Law’s sculptures are also on display in this gallery: Young Obelisk of 1981 and Reclining Obelisk of 1984. The ancient form of the obelisk has long been associated with astronomical phenomena and the sun God Ra, the Egyptians’ greatest deity. Law’s obelisks, by contrast, are humorously anthropomorphic, lending them a sense of absurdity and vulnerability. Gallery 3 Gallery 3 is dominated by one of the expansive canvases Law began in the early 1970s, Mister Paranoia 4, 20/11/70 No. 95. These works are so large that they often need to be removed from their stretchers in order to be installed in the gallery space, where they take up the entirety of the wall. Law constructed the stretchers himself and considered them an important part of the work, and the gridded armature is perceptible beneath the surface of Mister Paranoia 4. The canvas is bounded by a rhombus drawn by hand in black oil paint, the base of which has seeped into the unprimed canvas, creating a halo of oil around the line. The only other paint applied to the surface is used to inscribe the date, 20/11/70 in the lower right-hand corner. The precise dating of Law’s works, which he incorporated into their titles, highlights his sense of artmaking as a daily practice and his longstanding interest in numerology. This is particularly apparent when the works are displayed in series, such as the set of eight drawings shown in on the left-hand wall of this gallery. On the right-hand wall is one of Law’s black “scribble drawings” from 1972, which counters the laconic and audacious gesture of Mister Paranoia 4 with a strenuous intensity. Every millimeter of the canvas save a narrow, uneven border is covered with diagonal pencil marks to create a dense and grainy surface that captures the repetitive movements of the artist’s hand. The scribble drawings make explicit the psychic charge Law sought in all his works, which he contemplated at length while sitting in a chair in his studio, destroying those works that did not pass muster. The chair subsequently became part of Law’s sculptural repertoire, drawing on his early work as a carpenter. Now empty, the chair conjures the absent body of Law and a lineage of artists stretching back to Vincent van Gogh who have used this object as a poignant stand-in for the self. Positioned opposite Mister Paranoia 4, Law’s Blue Chair suggests further possibilities for contemplation and transformation. .